Life Upside Down
Expect the unexpected from the Coen Brothers
BY FRANK PITTMAN
Parents may find it adorable--if a little mystifying--that children delight in watching the same movie over and over again. Although as adults, we're willing to tolerate a little variety in our movies of choice, we continue to be similarly hooked on repeating the same movie-going experience. The difference is that we do it by getting attached to our favorite genres--slightly different reworkings of the same basic film world, implicitly reassuring us that what we've already learned from the movies about life and the people around us is all we'll ever need to know.
Whatever their differences in character and plot, almost all films are variations and combinations of a limited range of genres we've come to know and love, each with its own audience and its own particular gratifications. Some moviegoers find reassurance of their gender stereotypes at macho adventures or hardware movies with invulnerable heroes, ingenious weapons, acres of broken glass, and car wrecks punctuated by a heavy-metal score. Such movies are much like a drug. Other audiences get their paranoia recharged with film noir, moving through a world full of dark secrets, plots, and often an all-wise private detective who can see clearly through the fog of evil. Less sophisticated audiences may go for slasher films, which make kids cling to one another in the dark. Those of a more romantic bent may feel at home amidst screwball comedies, in which even nincompoops and dingbats can find love. Or they may keep it simple with love stories in which Boy meets Girl, Boy loses Girl, Boy gets Girl (all usually engineered by Girl.) With every genre, whatever the variations an individual film may offer, we know ahead of time that the underlying feel and message will always be the same.
The current filmmakers who may best understand the deep appeal of genre films, as well as their limitations, are the writer-director team of Ethan and Joel Coen. The Coen Brothers have made 11 films together. One (Fargo) won a few Oscars, several more (Raising Arizona, O Brother Where Art Thou?) made money, but few of them have been very popular with mainstream audiences. Through their nearly 20-year career, the Coens have been extraordinarily adept at reproducing the look, feel, and sensibility of a variety of genre films, from roadrunner cartoons through gangster murder-fests to a Capraesque screwball comedy about the common man who invents the hula hoop. They're masters of irony, revealing manifold discrepancies between appearances and reality and ironically turning each genre on its ear, not cynically or to parody them, but to expose the layers of truth beneath the surface. They're not trying to debunk or smugly expose the rotten underbellies of their characters, but to reveal that the best of us and the worst of us are, in the end, somehow nobler than our posturings would suggest.
The Coens specialize in undercutting the familiar, comfortable mythology created by each genre. They don't offer us heroes to affirm our fantasies of ourselves. There are no idealized sex objects in their movies, no one to fall in love with or lust after. Few Coen characters are very virtuous, and fewer are even vaguely competent. Instead, the films are populated by dumb, ugly losers who become more sympathetic as we and the Coens dig deeper. They unite us in recognition of, and affection for, our shared absurdity.
Every time we think we're comfortable with our understanding of a character, the Coens show us another perspective and a new take. For instance, in Raising Arizona, we find ourselves increasingly pulling for low-life convenience-store robber and kidnapper, Nicholas Cage, as he displays his total devotion to his sterile-cop wife, Holly Hunter, by kidnapping a baby for her. In The Big Lebowski, Jeff Bridges is a burned-out Los Angeles hippie and bowler who, in pursuit of a soiled rug, inadvertently steps into the Bogart role in a Raymond Chandlerish reprise of The Big Sleep, about murder in a rich and eccentric family. The utter simplicity of his needs and wants always contrasts starkly with the complexity and greed of all the characters he's offhandedly exposing as he frets over his rug.
The Kafkaesque Barton Fink (1991) begins as an update on Frank Capra, glorifying and idealizing the common man. Fink (John Torturro) is a Clifford Odetsian socialist playwright who goes to Hollywood in the '30s, meets an alcoholic William Faulkner, and goes to work for an appallingly crass and sentimental tycoon. While suffering from writer's block in a crumbling hotel lifted from The Shining, Fink meets a real common man--an ingratiating salesman played by John Goodman. Initially serving as Fink's inspiration, Goodman turns out to be a serial killer. He may be patterned after Willie Loman, but he carries a hat box around that holds a recent victim's head.
The film noir-ish Fargo (1996) is the Coens' masterpiece. Frances McDormand plays a pregnant North Dakota police chief, battling morning sickness as she investigates the botched kidnapping and murder of William H. Macy's wife by a uniquely stupid and trigger-happy pair of hired kidnappers (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare, one of whom ends up in a wood chipper). The film's Scandinavian emotional flatness matches the flat, white snow-cover of the countryside. Amidst widespread carnage, McDormand's innocent incomprehension of how people can do bad things on a nice day just for money leads to a hilarious black comedy, with a detective who's, for once, far more naive than all-knowing.
Now, after 10 comic reworkings and juxtapositions of familiar genres, the brothers offer us their remake of a classic, the 1955 Ealing Studio comedy The Ladykillers. The updated version is fairly faithful, but a slight change in the new film throws it into a quite different genre.
During a decade of war and devastation and loss of empire, the Ealing Studios affirmed that Brittania, even in shambles, ruled the waves because of the overriding power of the British character. Their gentle comedies of middle-class British manners overriding human foibles and selfishness included The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man in the White Suit, and Kind Hearts and Coronets, all starring Alec Guinness. The Ealings were an anglified version of Frank Capra, finding the shared basic decency that holds us together.
The Ladykillers told of a quintet of would-be robbers who, disguised as a string quintet practicing Boccherini, move into the upstairs of elderly widow (Katie Johnson). She lives with three ill-tempered parrots and pictures of her late husband, a naval officer who went down with his ship. The little old lady is tiny, lopsided, and maddeningly intrusive, but so well-mannered she overpowers everyone, including the local police station, with her moral authority. She's incapable of thinking badly of anyone else and she has absolutely no evil motives herself.
Alec Guinness, the leader of the gang, is gotten up with false teeth to look something between Humphrey Bogart and Max Schreck, the original vampire from 1922's Nosferatu. Despite his look of menace and inherent repulsiveness, he handles every crisis with tightly restrained grace and the composure that comes with superior manners. Beneath the faux culture of his menacing repulsiveness, he's clearly a charlatan. His cohorts, each of whom naively assumes Guinness has more sense than they do, include Cecil Parker as a squeamish retired colonel, Herbert Lom as an itchy hired killer, Danny Green as a mindless failed boxer, and Peter Sellers as a jittery juvenile.
The quintet robs an armored car and are exposed by Mrs. Lopsided, who demands they give the money back. They draw straws to see which of them will have to kill her. But her unshakeable rectitude overpowers each of them in turn, and exposes their shame over their misbehavior. In their greed and ineptitude, they end up killing off one another and leaving the "lolly" from the heist to her.
Alas, we're no longer in a world in which manners dictate behavior and in which we all speak a common language. The Coens, in their remake of Ladykillers, bring a different flavor to a familiar story and, as they do with every genre they upend, change the message. Both versions of The Ladykillers are black comedies, but the new version, rather than reassuring us, slaps us in the face.
Continued from page 1.
The new film is set on the Mississippi River in a roomy old house dominated by the ever-shifting portrait of the old lady's late husband. The landlady is now played by a rather large, loud, black woman, Irma P. Hall, who's just as virtuous as Katie Johnson, but not remotely fragile. She can give as good as she gets and is capable of knocking the gangsters around when they misbehave. She's accustomed to complaining to the local police station about hip-hop music, when her tastes lean toward gospel. But like her predecessor, she's entranced by the (recorded) Renaissance chamber music coming from the quintet in the basement.
The gang, set up to rob the nearby gambling boat, is led by Tom Hanks, with absurdly flowery language and exaggerated gestures of genteel Southern graciousness. Like Guinness, he overwhelms his underlings with shows of superior learning and breeding. But there's no menace to Hanks, and his sweet eyes, through the lavish facial hair, keep assuring us we have nothing to fear. When we looked into Alec Guinness's eyes, we saw an evil that scared us, even if it didn't scare his housemates. But when we look into Tom Hanks' eyes, we only see Tom. Tom Hanks can't scare anyone.
Hanks, perhaps our most beloved movie star, gets his absurdly flowery patter just right, rendering him essentially incoherent. Just as Guinness could never play a normal person without makeup, accents, or fussy business, Tom Hanks is stuck with being just the sweetest, most ordinary of men. Here he's the sweetest, most ordinary of men wearing a silly beard and talking funny. He lacks the menace that makes us feel so protective of Mrs. Lopsided.
Hanks's gang is multicultural, with a chain-smoking Vietnamese general (Tzi Ma), a brainless football player (Ryan Hurst), a lethargic Yankee demolitions expert (J. K. Simmons) who came south with the Civil Rights movement and is still trying to prove he isn't bothered by the hip-hop attitudes of dreadlocked, jive-talking Marlon Wayans. Young Wayans's outrageous exploitation of white racial guilt, in the tradition of Eddie Murphy or Chris Rock, gives the film its primary energy.
Everyone in the cast speaks a different language (or none at all), and the misunderstandings are outrageous. The football player is essentially mute and the Vietnamese general incoherent. The Yankee beats around the bush, the black teenager's profanity is mind-boggling, and Hanks's medieval rigmarole, never using a short word when a longer one might be squeezed in, makes communication among the six housemates well-nigh impossible. The imperious landlady says everything straight and can't make sense out of anything that isn't straight.
The big-voiced, big-hearted, multilayered Hall dominates the film as totally as she does the gang of nincompoops. But Hall's impact on the audience is different from Katie Johnson's in the original because we don't feel protective of her. In fact, we may even feel, and resist, our urge to come to the rescue of the five inept guys, who are no match for her. Every one of these guys has had a punitive mother at some point in his past, and when Hall gets on the warpath, they feel just like they did then.
As always with the Coens, we get a far more complex message when they ironically upturn a familiar story. Unlike the original, this is no longer a story about the sentimental triumph of virtue over strength, since Hall could eat Hanks or any of the others for breakfast. Instead the film is about the failure of communication in a multilingual society. These aren't homogenized Brits, with a common language and culture, but rainbow-hued Americans, each loyal to his own linguistic and cultural identity. They just can't talk straight the way Hall's Mrs. Lopsided can. So they can't come together in a common goal.
The Coens, of course, poke fun at Southerners' penchant for talking and acting excessively southern and African American youths' penchant for acting excessively black, both alienating everybody else, except maybe middle-class Jewish intellectuals from Minnesota. As always, the Coens capture the feel and the silliness of each region, segment, and ethnic group of our society.
Despite what some critics have had to say, there's nothing cynical here. What the Coens do offer us is their ironic take instead of the self-congratulatory sweetness we've come to expect in comedies from sentimentalists like Ealing and Capra. And we don't even get to protect a little old lady, in our hearts, from the evil genius who would kill her. There's no great moral victory in protecting big, tough old ladies with weapon-sized handbags from Forrest Gump.
The new Ladykillers is great fun. Like all Coen films, it's stunningly photographed by Roger Deakins, and the music--mostly hearty, soul-lifting gospel songs--makes it quite clear who'll prevail. The film has some joyously vulgar moments in glorious bad taste worthy of Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles, including a couple whose romance begins at an irritable bowel syndrome support group and mixer. Still, the film fails with audiences, like most Coen movies on first viewing. It confounds our genre expectations.
The Coens aren't going to make moviegoing easy for us, but they sure make it provocative. As they switch genres from the Melting Pot to the Tower of Babel, they enable us to see so much more of life's complicated truths, behind the all-too-familiar screen.
Frank Pittman, M.D., is a contributing editor to the Psychotherapy Networker and is in private practice. Address: 960 Johnson Ferry Road, N.E., Suite 543, Atlanta, GA 30342. E-mails to the author may be sent to Fsp3md@aol.com. Letters to the Editor about this department can be e-mailed to Letters@psychnetworker.org.
Copyright Psychotherapy Networker, Inc. Jul/Aug 2004
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved
